


The Owl and the Panther

by wily_one24



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-05-16
Packaged: 2017-11-05 11:45:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/406038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wily_one24/pseuds/wily_one24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during 1.17 'Hat Trick', Jefferson has more than a hat in mind...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Owl and the Panther

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** The Owl and The Panther.   
> **Rating:** R/NC17 (violence, sexual themes)  
>  **Character/Pairing:** Emma/Jefferson, brief cameos of Mary Margaret and Henry.   
> **Spoilers:** Episode 1.17 "Hat Trick".   
> **Summary/Prompt:** Emma/Jefferson, non/dubcon, Jefferson has more than a hat in mind...  
>  **Disclaimer:** Yeah, they're not mine. Not in the slightest, because... lookit what I did with them... that's why.   
> **Length:** 6,124.  
>  **Warning:** Dub-con. Liek woah. Triggery types might wanna stay clear.

***~*~*~*  
THE OWL AND THE PANTHER  
*~*~*~***

Emma’s fingers tremble as she pulls the needle through the stiff, thick felt, before snipping off the last of the thread. 

“I can’t make it work.” Frustration, heavily tinged with fear, cracks her voice as she slams the hastily completed hat down on the bench. “What you’re asking me is impossible.”

He’s insane. He’s completely insane, forehead bouncing maniacally off the hatbox before he stands up, grabbing the discarded hat desperately, feeling the inside lining, testing. 

She reminds herself, yet again for what seems the hundredth time since arriving in this town, that she should have trusted her instincts, should have left him hobbling on the side of the road. But she’s the Sheriff and she can’t mow people down with her car and not help them home. She hadn’t wanted to come inside, hadn’t wanted the tea, her body screaming to get back out into the woods in search of Mary Margaret. 

Not that it matters now. 

She remembers forcing herself to swim back into focus, blinking herself awake as soft, buttery white leather enveloped her bound and gagged form on his sofa. Further back, she has vague recollections of him lowering her down, positioning her pliant and unresponsive body as he pulled her arms behind her back. 

A puff of annoyance had seared itself over her neck as she tried to move, but then his fingers ghosted over her neck, her shoulders, sliding her jacket off each arm to better tether her hands together and then she’d slipped under again.

The memory makes her shiver, all down her spine, as does the realisation that it was not a chance meeting by the side of the road. He had orchestrated it, she’d known the second she saw her Sheriff desk in his telescope, a fact concreted when she’d stumbled across Mary Margaret tied to a chair in the room with the Mayor’s wallpaper. She was his target all along. 

_Stay calm._ Her brain had demanded, as it always did in times like this, as she had trained it to do. _Do whatever it takes to stay alive and deal with it later._

Of course, that was before she understood the depth to his insanity. 

She could see the headlines now, Regina’s sneer of smug distaste. Of course she would perish trying to help a fugitive on the run from a murder charge after drinking a mad man’s tea and helping make his hats. By her own gun, no less. 

“No!” 

He can’t keep still, some part of him has to be moving at all times, she has noticed this one fact in the midst of the hysteria occurring all around her, so his quick gait around the table, for what must be the fiftieth time, does not bother her. 

His proximity when he comes to stand just behind and to her left does. Personal boundaries are not high on his priorities and she cannot get the feel of his hands on her neck, forcing her down in the chair, cannot let go of his breath in her ear, the pressure of his chin on the top of her scalp. 

Her spine freezes again when his hand comes up and caresses the back of her head. 

One moment lucid, almost conciliatory and amiable, the next crazed and threatening, she has no basis to predict his movements. Her first instinct is to fight, to claw her way out, away from him, out of this house. But thoughts of the gun and Mary Margaret keep her still. 

Instantly, she regrets once again not trusting her instincts as she’s slammed face down on the table. 

“If you can’t find magic in yourself.” He breathes into her ear, hot and thick and unwelcome. “Then I will have to find it for you.”

She blinks again, dazed by the contact, by the almost certain bruise that must be forming on the right side of her face when it had hit the tools on his desk. He’s too quick for her, already acting, before she can regain her senses. 

A soft slinky material is shoved tight in her mouth, her right arm is twisted back behind her again, then her left, but she has no thoughts of fighting at the moment, not with the muzzle of the gun planted firmly in the base of her skull. It jiggles, a physical reminder of its presence and her vulnerability, before it disappears and she feels her wrists being tethered again. 

He has no rope in this room, but he has numerous cloths and scarves and one is wound tightly around her wrists, his movements rough and clinical, as if he’s barely aware of her presence at all, more concerned with getting the knots tied properly. 

An ache blooms in the front of her hips, the edge of the table jutting harshly, but there is no room to move back. He’s holding her down with his body, all of his weight, pressing right into her. Her neck cracks as she lifts it, adjusts her head, turns to get a better view of him. 

She barely has time to register the explicitly sexual situation and her own precarious position when he finishes the bind and his right hand slides from her back all the way around her waist to the front of her jeans. 

Instinct catches up to her then and she bucks, hard, kicking back, trying to dislodge him. But his left hand slams her body back down to the table and she is nothing but an insect pinned to a tray as he clumsily struggles to pull down her pants with one hand. 

Gun or not, she will not make this easy on him. 

_Stay calm._ Her brain orders again, clearly in defiance of the rest of her body which is well on the way to fully fledged panic. _Take stock. Make a plan. Take action._

The stock is not good. He has all the weapons. He has Mary Margaret. Nobody knows she is here. She is bound again, tighter than before. If she fights now, she will lose and there is no telling what he will do to Mary Margaret after that. 

When her legs are bare, freed from her jeans and boots, she is spun around. Once again face to face with him. It seems alien to her now, to ever have thought of him as friendly or unthreatening, her own foolishness at following him inside seems almost unforgiving. 

He has dark, bottomless eyes, _mad_ her brain helpfully suggests, and the violence of his act contrasts with the softness with which he stops to caress the side of her face, the blooming bruise that makes her flinch. 

“Oh, Emma” He breathes out his disappointment, voice carrying a sympathetic edge that grates at her. “What happened to you?”

Then he leans forward, pushing her with his chest until she’s forced to lie back down with him looming over her. 

“What happened to make you abandon magic?” He pauses, cheek to cheek with his mouth close to the skin on her neck, behind her ear. “To deny it so resolutely, when you have irrefutable proof of it day after day?”

She gags against the cloth, jaw working hard to spit it out as he breathes her in, smells her. 

“Don’t worry.” He whispers it like a secret, a shared game between friends. “I’ll find it in you.”

Then he moves lower, still breathing deep, as if trying to smell the magic he thinks is there. There’s an awful moment, a feeling of unbearable pressure on her elbows when they carry both his and her weight, until he shifts again, until it returns to being merely uncomfortable. 

Her head thumps back, afraid and hopeful all at once. He won’t… he does not mean… surely he isn’t going to…?

He does and he will, she realises, when he stops at her underwear, hands braced on either side of her hips. All she needs is one moment, one mistake on his part, and she might possibly have a way out of this. 

The chance is small and she has to take it. 

But that means playing the game, that means letting him push her legs wider, not kicking him in the back of his skull as he hooks his fingers in her underwear and pulls it to the side. His breath, hot on her skin earlier, feels like it sears the flesh of her inner thigh as he leans forward. 

Her tongue pushes at the gag, again and again until she finally finds leverage and she lolls her head to the side to spit it out. She gasps, sucking fresh air into her lungs, not looking too deeply into whether it was the release of the gag or his tongue on her body that made her sound like that. 

It comes, that chance, before she’s truly ready, but he leans back, sits up slightly so that he can look up at her. She doesn’t question the reason why, only slams her knees together, hitting both sides of his skull. He’s stunned for a second, but it’s all she needs to rear her knees back again, this time closing them tightly around his ears and trapping his head before twisting her hips to the left. 

She slams his head on the corner of the table and his body drops like a stone, sliding out from her knees with a heavy slump to the floor. She should wait, count to five, to see if he’s really down, but she’s past the point of caring. 

Throwing her body to the right, she rolls, pausing only seconds to grab the largest pair of scissors between her teeth. He hasn’t reared up again, hasn’t reached up to grab at her legs, hasn’t even shot the gun. 

So she runs. 

It takes her a second to orient herself in the hallway and then she kicks Mary Margaret’s door. It bounces in its hinges, but doesn’t move. Without her hands, she has no choice but to take a run up and hit it with the side of her shoulder. Pain blooms instantly, but the door bursts open and she stumbles forward onto her knees. 

Mary Margaret’s relief at seeing her only lasts a fraction of a second. Emma can see the instant the other woman’s panic doubles, triple, quadruples and she can only imagine what she looks like, bursting into the room, wild and breathless, partially naked, face swelling and bruised, with a giant pair of scissors wedged between her teeth. 

There are many words to describe Mary Margaret, but slow on the uptake were never ones Emma associated with her and the woman catches on quickly when Emma scoots up and deposits the scissors into one of her tethered hands. 

She rises up on her haunches and turns her back, waiting for what seems like an hour before she hears the rasp of metal on cloth, feels the sudden freedom of her arms again. She wastes no time spinning around and pulling Mary Margaret’s gag down before working on her arms. 

“Emma.” Mary Margaret breathes it, voice full of fear and worry. 

“I’m okay.” She replies, calmer than she feels, desperate for the woman to believe her as her fingers fumble uselessly trying to get the scissors working on the knots as they shake. “Let’s just get out of here. Now.”

“Emma!”

Louder now, panic returning full bloom, Emma barely has time to react before a large body slams into her, knocking all three of them over. Wood slams into her thigh and her head cracks on the ground, muffled oomphs from all three of them sound in her ear. 

She scrambles towards the gun that fell, fingernails digging deep into the carpet, desperate to put distance between herself and Jefferson, but his hand is on her ankle, tight like a vice and pulling her back, dragging her along the floor. 

Underneath her own gasping pants and the grunts of Jefferson as she kicks with her free foot, her ears pick up the soft exertions of Mary Margaret trying to finish undoing the ties on her hands. 

_Stay down!_ But she doubts Mary Margaret can hear her thoughts. 

His weight is heavy on her legs as he climbs her body like a horizontal ladder, ankles, knees, hips, until his fingers twist in her hair and slam her head to the ground. White light bursts behind her eyes and she cries out. 

“Don’t!” But Mary Margaret is louder and getting taller, she’s free of the chair. “Don’t you hurt her!”

Suddenly she’s free and weightless and it takes her only seconds to launch forward and close her fingers around the cool metal of the gun, rolling with it, pointing it back in the direction he once was. She sees her tactical error before she’s even half way to upright. 

Those precious few seconds were enough for him to grab the scissors, holding them now open against Mary Margaret’s throat. 

Emma can’t look, she cannot look into the deeply terrified and apologetic eyes of her roommate, her first real friend in this town. 

And so she looks at Jefferson, dark features against pale skin, deep eyes and darker lashes, full lips cracked in a threatening grin. They’re at a standstill, but the expression on his face tells her that he knows, he knows he has the upper hand. 

“Let her go.”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Emma.” He sounds as if he’s trying to soothe a wild, frightened animal, but there’s an undercurrent there, the last efforts of a desperate, despairing man. “I need you.”

Her fingers ease up on the trigger slightly, palms sweaty. 

“But sweet little Mary Margaret?” She sees him jostle the woman in question, an act that causes the merest little whimper. “I wasn’t planning on hurting her, but she’s not part of my plan.”

Even as she watches, trying not to see the grimness set in Mary Margaret’s eyes or hear the proof of how much she’s holding back, never slow on the uptake Mary Margaret, trying so hard not to make it worse for her, Emma sees the open blade slice just a fraction into tender skin. 

A drop, two drops of blood trickle after the blade, bright and obscene on the pale skin of Mary Margaret’s throat, and Emma has the most bizarre thought of _Rose Red_ , before she lowers her arm, trying to shake the implications. 

“Good girl.” Encourages Jefferson. “Now give it to me.”

It’s automatic, the twirling of the gun until the handle is presented to him. She forces her right foot forward, enough to stretch out her arm to its fullest length, passing the gun to him without getting any closer. 

The loss of it brings not the surge of panic she would expect, but a sense of resignation, the stirrings of thick, sludgy, long buried helplessness.

And Mary Margaret shakes her head, a slight gesture, her eyes breaking as she looks at Emma. 

“I’m okay.” Emma nods in encouragement. “Don’t worry.”

It’s barely a whisper, words Emma doesn’t think either of them believes as Jefferson pushes on Mary Margaret’s shoulder until she’s sitting on the righted chair. It doesn’t take a genius to understand what comes next and Emma is once again tying her limbs down. 

“Make them snug.” Jefferson is sure to instruct. “Because this is the last interruption.”

“Don’t you dare hurt her.” Seethes Mary again, quietly vicious as she strains her face away from Emma and the encroaching gag. “Don’t you…”

And Emma hesitates, reluctant to force the issue, but the cocking of the gun against Mary Margaret’s temple is enough for her to jiggle the cloth up. 

“I’m sorry.” 

It’s Mary Margaret’s last concession as Emma fits the gag back into place. To her credit, Mary Margaret does not break eye contact with Emma as Jefferson takes the crook of her elbow and begins to pull her out of the room. 

As soon as the door closes, she snaps her elbow free of him, pushes him away from her, but before he can react her hands are raised in a cease fire. He nods as if he understands and walks them both to yet another room. It almost looks like gentle support, his hand guiding just behind her back without touching, but there’s a threat underneath that they’re both aware of. 

She’s grateful, at least, that it’s no crazed den of hats and millinery. 

He closes the door softly behind him, but the second he does he slams her back into the wall by a hand on her shoulder. It would almost comical, this quiet, reverent _care_ they have not to disturb the woman a few rooms down. As if she hasn’t already seen enough to figure out what’s happening. 

“Please.” Emma can only echo Mary Margaret as her spine bounces off the wall. “Just don’t hurt her. Don’t…”

“Emma.”

It’s a whisper, a plea, a command to stop. And it works, she wishes it didn’t, wishes he would stop saying her name so much. It’s beginning to lose all meaning. 

“Emma, Emma, Emma.” A low litany of disappointment, then his lips are on hers and when she pushes back, he holds her down with his left forearm diagonally across her chest. “You’re really making this difficult.”

His lips smash into hers again and he pushes hard, she can feel his teeth mash against hers, the skin of her lips flattened against bone. Then his right hand comes up and she can feel the edge of the gun meet her temple, his right hand sliding it down the side of her face, her neck, down her arm. 

Before she really understands what he’s doing, he pulls her hands up over her head and then she feels the tether, another tie attached to what must be a picture hook of sorts. He’s methodical, pulling it tight enough that she feels it in her wrists, a definite pressure, tight enough to hold. She tugs at it anyway, not surprised when it doesn’t shift. 

She watches him step back, notes with casual interest where he places the gun when he deposits it on a small table, his eyes scanning her head to toe. Her body is stretched, elongated, a bow bent and quivering and she has never felt more naked as his eyes drink in the sight of her small black tank top and the small matching black underwear. 

“It’s in you.” Her murmurs with reverence, his hands hovering over her skin, a mere inch or two from actually touching. “I can feel it.”

All over, his hands hovering without actually touching, up her arms to her wrists, down to her side slipping over her ribs and hips, around the front to her abdomen. An inch, maybe, if she breathes too deeply he would brush her skin. 

Her head lifts from the wall, stretching forward, and she has no idea what his reaction will be, but she’s fairly certain it won’t be a good one. 

“There’s no such thing.” She enunciates carefully. “As magic.”

It breaks the barrier as he takes that last step forward, hands sliding on to her skin, fingertips first just on her belly button, spreading out and palms following splaying over her belly, her abdomen, up underneath her ribs and around her waist. 

He makes a sound, a loud exhale of breath, a sigh and a moan all intermingled and it reminds her of nothing more than a drug addict in the middle of withdrawal finally getting a hit. 

“It’s everywhere.” He says it down to his hands, forehead planted against her sternum. “You just have to look.”

She looks up, to the only safe place in the room, the ceiling, far away from him and the soft hands on her skin, the tips of his thumbs as they spread out and up over her ribs, higher. 

“Why me?” She asks the unaskable. “What makes you think… this… is the way?”

Little electrified tails of nerves follow his touch, stirring up something inside and she bites the insides of her cheeks as he buries his face in her neck, mouth closing over the shelf of her clavicle making her gasp out loud again. 

“Because I’ve watched you, you know I have.” 

A quick flash in her brain of the telescope in his living room, trained on the Sheriff’s office. 

“Graham found it with only one kiss.” It hits her, a wave of freshly buried loss, and she hates him in this second, resents him for his careless treatment of this stolen memory. “And I need a whole lot more than him.”

The edges of his soft, finely curved fingernails brush over her left nipple and she closes her eyes, scrunches them shut against the reality of the situation, the tightening that is her body’s unmistakable response.

Mercifully, it seems, he gives her a reprieve, sliding his hands away from the front of her body, around her ribs to meet in the middle of her back. She has only moments to wonder what his game plan is before ten fingertips dance down her spine. Then he flattens his hands again and jerks her forward, brings her entire body flush against his. 

They rock together before he presses her back against the wall and she feels all of him, the sculptured muscles hidden under the puffed sleeves of his shirt, the strength of him, not an inch wasted, a firm chest that chafes against her pebbled nipples, makes them ache. And his hips digging into hers.

“I know you, Emma.” He says it into the skin under her ear, the tendon of her neck. “I know what lights you up, want you want so desperately you can’t even say it out loud.”

He doesn’t, he can’t, she tries to breathe, tries to shake the gossamer feel of the entire night, wants to get back to reality. Even if reality is his right hand coming up to cup her chin, thumb caressing her jaw line and his left hand dropping, slipping down against the outside of her thigh and up the inside. 

“And it’s everything you can have, if you let yourself. All you have to do is ask for it.”

A long, wet kiss as he sucks the tendon up to her ear. 

“Stability. Safety. Love. Friends. Family. Connection. A place to belong.” She tries to shrink herself away from his next words, two puffs of air that barely make a sound, are barely breaths at all as his full lips open against the shell of her inner ear stretching the vowel out to an obscenely long tease. “A home.”

Then he pulls back as his right hand comes down and his forearm lays across the top of her chest, his left hand plants itself firmly on the top of her underwear, a heavy, warm weight she can’t shake. 

“So that’s the question right now, isn’t it?” He nudges her face forward, mouths the line of her jaw until he can claim her mouth and then let go. “Do you want it, Emma?”

She nods, a tremulous shaky movement, but it’s not enough, never enough behind the dark of her closed lids. 

“Yes.” She says it with a gasp, a gasp that only gets louder when his fingers slide right up inside her. “God, yes.”

And then she’s lost, falling into the trap hard and fast, as her body won’t allow her to stop, refuses to allow her to hide the trembles he causes in her, the slick wetness that coats him. 

It would be easier, she thinks, if he would stay constant and violent and ugly. 

Her brain struggles, scrambles for some way to cling to the memory of pain, the pain he’d caused mere minutes before, but it fractures again, splinters and she cannot escape the conciliatory, careful, albeit demanding way he’s being right now, bringing forth the near forgotten amiability when he’d introduced himself on the road. 

“How?” He challenges, firm and unrelenting. “How do you want it?”

He’s breaking her open, with his words crawling inside her skull and his fingers plunging once, twice, and again, a steady rhythm she thinks he knows will drive her crazy with the absence of friction. In fact, she’s beginning to think he will give her anything she asks for. 

“Harder.” It’s a soft demand, an unused voice, but he complies and she moans her approval. “Faster.”

Life taught her early and viciously that it’s better and easier to be a giver, not a taker, and this is something that encompasses every aspect of her life. Her compact, Spartan, easily packed up and moved, empty, meaningless life. The less you ask for, the less you seem to need, the higher the chance of people sticking around. 

She thinks he doesn’t need her to find magic, it’s right there in the telescope that allows him to see through brick, windows and all the way inside her brain. 

Her eyes flick open and she sees him watching her, unblinking bottomless eyes, and it doesn’t take long before her traitorous body comes for him, over him, and he kisses her hard as her reward. It surprises both of them when her mouth opens and lets him in. 

It’s too hot, too hard, too hungry to stop now. Emma hasn’t been touched in a long time, many months before she even came to Storybrooke, and touched with any sense of care even longer, a rarity. She could weep with it, this desperate need for physical solace. 

He kisses her again, mouth hot on hers, over her jaw, down her neck, and she should stop it now, at the very least try to stop it, try to hold onto the last vestiges of pride before everything falls apart. She could say the words, say no, stop, please, but begging is another weakness altogether and he isn’t really giving her a chance as she feels his hand slip from her underwear to loosen the button of his pants. 

She struggles in earnest for a second, two, pulling hard on her wrists and wrenching her shoulders. The movement causes pain to circle the scapula of her right shoulder, where she’d broken through the door, but even then her leverage is lost when he grabs each of her thighs in his fists and drags them up. 

The strain on her extended shoulders aches deep, pulls, and it’s a pain she’s grateful for, hangs onto, needs as Jefferson covers her mouth with his and then pushes right in, swallowing her scream. When he pulls back to look at her again she won’t give him the satisfaction, stretches her neck as far to the side as she possibly can, scrunching her eyes shut tight again, trying to block him out. 

“Emma.” A cajoling voice, trying to bring her back as he nuzzles the side of her face left open to him. “Hey, look at me.”

Her fingers tighten into fists high above them and she sets her jaw tight, won’t give him this, even as her panting breath quickens, her feet planted firmly in the back of his thighs, her hips meeting his and giving back just as hard. 

One of his hands lands gently on her face, thumb sliding underneath her eye, and she resists the caress as his face plants itself in the side of her neck. 

She can feel him, every part of him, and she thinks she will never be able to forget the smell of him on her, in her, never able to not feel him whenever she tries to close her eyes, sliding in and out and drawing responses from her body she wishes she could bite down. Deeper still, she knows she will. Eventually. 

“Come for me, Emma.”

She screws her eyes tighter and sets her jaw even harder. 

“Go to hell.”

But she will and they both know it. All he has to do is wait her out, keep up the torturous steady rhythm as everything inside her keeps grasping, drawing him in. She can already feel herself tightening with the wet, slick slide of him in and out. 

His pants are just as irregular as hers and maybe two can play at that game, maybe all she has to do is wait him out, but luck is not on her side tonight. His left arm leaves the wall he was bracing himself against and snakes its way between them. 

She knows what’s coming, but tries to twist herself away from it. There is no escape and he coats two fingers in their combined lust before taking her clit between the knuckles of his fore and middle finger, giving a small, twisting tug. 

It’s a cruel little mirror of her knees on his head earlier, when she’d actually hurt him, and it cracks a seam from her core all the way to her outside, spreading like a spider web to her limbs. She’s still shaking when he slumps with a groan. 

There’s a moment of stillness, of silence too deep, and then Emma lets her legs fall, dangles uselessly and helplessly between him and the wall. He sighs and tries to meet her eyes with a gaze she’s not ready for, so she avoids his face. 

Reaching up, he lets her arms go and she feels them drop like weights, dead and useless. Shaking feeling back into them, Emma pushes herself off the wall, pushes him away from her as her underwear slides back into place. 

He wants to talk, she can tell, he’s about to start speaking and she is nowhere near ready to listen. 

“I’ll make your damned hat.”

Then she grabs the gun and walks out of the room and he doesn’t stop her. 

Before tonight, she has never made a hat, but now she’s familiar with the process, the cutting, the templates, stretching the felt, sewing it in place. They’re not pretty, either of her hats, but they’re technically functional. 

He sits silently across from her, watching, and as far as she can tell he doesn’t blink, but she avoids looking at him as much as possible, so maybe he does. 

“Em…”

But he doesn’t get far. She stands up and thrusts the finished product at him and picks up the rest of her clothes. 

“We’re leaving now.”

He doesn’t stop her this time either. 

Mary Margaret’s eyes are red as Emma carefully snips the last of her binds away. She has left the gag until last and figures with free hands, Mary Margaret can do it herself. She’s not really ready for the questions or the concern. 

“Are you okay?”

Soft warm, bottomless pools of concern that choke her. 

Emma nods her head, a quick, precise movement that brooks no further questions as she turns back to the open door. She has her eyes peeled, but she doubts Jefferson will come after them now. 

“Where is he?” But Mary Margaret doesn’t know this. “What happened?”

“He’s not…” Her voice waivers, falters, and the sharp eyes of Mary Margaret narrow at the weakness, too smart for her own good. “He got what he wanted. We’re free to go.”

They walk out of the house in silence and a quick search provides Emma with her bug. They keys sit on the driver’s seat like an invitation. She feels sick. 

“Go.” Emma gives the words to Mary Margaret as she stands back. “Just… go.”

Mary Margaret quirks her head to the left, sizes her up, and ignores the open, waiting driver side door, instead walking around to sit patiently in the passenger seat. At Emma’s continued silence, she looks up with impossibly wide and honest eyes. 

“I’m not leaving you now.”

And as she slides into the familiar seat, her feet planted on the pedals and her fingers wrapped around the top of the wheel, Emma begins to cry. 

Later that morning, when Mary Margaret is sitting back in her cell making a heated demand from Mr. Gold about visitors that Emma wants nothing to do with, Emma needs to see her son. It hits her, an all-encompassing desperation she knows won’t go away until it happens. So she sits with him outside the school before classes start. 

Henry, sweet Henry with his optimism and his book of belief and… 

“Can I see your book?” She asks suddenly, practically grabbing at it without waiting for an answer. 

Because he is sweet, he gives it over without question, and she knows he has already sensed a difference in her, can tell by the worried crease of his brow and his too direct eyes. 

But she can’t breathe, because in the flicking of the pages, she doesn’t even have to read the words to find him. Jefferson, jumping off the page in the midst of a thousand hats. She flicks another few pages and begins at the beginning, drinking in the words, studying the pictures, looking for something, for… 

The bell rings and Henry jumps up. 

“You keep it.” He says with a gentle smile. “I get the feeling you need it more than me right now.”

And she does, but she doesn’t tell him why. Never Henry. 

The closer she gets back to his house, the more her palms sweat on the wheel. The road is deserted and she’s mildly surprised to see a familiar car this far out. Driving the opposite way. Emma blinks as David Nolan disappears back towards town without acknowledging her. 

But he is not her purpose right now. 

Her nerves stretch when she pulls up alongside the large estate, apprehension tickling every nerve ending she has and possibly more she doesn’t. Her brain is screaming at her to turn around and walk away, to just go, but she didn’t come all this way back here to stop now. 

Jefferson is nowhere in sight, the house large and quiet and seemingly empty, and Emma bites her lip. She points the muzzle of her gun down the larger end of his telescope and shoots it. Just for spite. He won’t be watching her anytime soon. 

But that’s not enough. 

Something eats at her, a spark inside her brain, telling her that things are not right. He should have come to find her when she broke in, at the very least come to investigate the gun shot. She slips through the door carefully, gun cocked and ready, and finds nothing in the hallway. 

The door she’d broken open with her shoulder swings on the hinges, the lock cracked, and Emma chooses that room to investigate first. 

They fought in here, Jefferson tumbling over both of them, his hands in her hair, slamming her face down to the ground, she’s not surprised to see the destruction. Again, the suspicion niggling at her brain won’t let things go and she looks harder. 

There was a fight here, but not between Jefferson and herself. There was a larger, more vicious struggle and she sees the carnage left behind. They didn’t cause this.

And lastly, Emma spots the window, broken into shards. 

There are a few pieces of glass on the floor, but not nearly enough to cover the empty frame. The only logical explanation then is that something went _out_. She walks over hesitantly, scared she knows what she will see as she approaches the blood streaked window frame. 

He’s not lying on the ground several floors below, but his hat is, amidst a shower of broken glass. 

The second hat she made for him, that she can now see in her head him putting it on as she’d turned and walked out. 

Emma does not want this, does not want the sense of doom that blankets her, with the almost certain knowledge of who Mary Margaret had demanded to see, who had been here in the time since she’d left. 

She takes aim and shoots the hat, the force causing it to turn sideways and roll on the rim, bouncing over the paving stones. She shoots again and the hat is rent in two. Because she can, because there is nothing left to do. 

And then Emma walks away. 

***

  
_”I passed by his garden and marked with one eye  
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie,  
The Panther took pie crust, and gravy, and meat,  
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat,  
When the pie was all finished, The Owl, as a boon,  
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon,  
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,  
And concluded the banquet by—“_  
-As spoken by the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. 


End file.
